John Healey

European development cooperation and the poor.

Preface The Context of Poverty Poverty Reduction Goals and Strategies of the European Development Cooperation Agencies Role and Modes of Intervention of the Development Cooperation Agencies for Poverty Reduction The Approach to Poverty Reduction in Country Programmes Have the Poor Benefited? Evidence of Effectiveness and Impact Good and Bad Approaches: Case Study Evidence Options for Reaching the Poor More Effectively: Some New Thinking Poverty Reduction: Organisation and Management of the European Agencies Conclusion and Suggestions Annexes 1-5 References Indexes

Conclusions and some Suggestions for Reform

This review of seven poor countries reveals a wide range of opportunities for external agencies which seek to support or influence the pursuit of poverty reduction (PR). These include the need for: more effective economic policies to promote employment-creating growth; a shift of resources and services into rural areas; a reorientation of public social services and an improvement in their quality at basic levels; the creation of mechanisms to assist poorer regions and districts; better targeting of credit and other measures to help the poor; a redistribution of land ownership and use; strengthened institutional capacities at local levels.

The Context of Poverty

This is a study of the aspirations, roles, actions and effectiveness of European development agencies in trying to improve the lot of the poor. Yet inevitably the main determinants of the possibilities and chances of succeeding rest with the specific partner country — the nature of its poverty, its culture, its politics and government attitudes, policies and capacities. It is appropriate therefore to begin with a brief review of the poverty situation in the seven poor or relatively poor countries which form the focus of this study. Although these seven countries are not necessarily representative of the poverty context in the developing world as a whole, they do cover three continents: India and Nepal in Asia, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe in Africa, and Bolivia in Latin America. The types of problems and opportunities posed are reasonably typical of many of the other country contexts in which the European agencies work.

The Approach to Poverty Reduction in the Country Programmes

This chapter does not start with a ‘model’ of how the agencies ought to go about their country operations if they are serious about poverty reduction. However, five questions are posed about their recent country operations which are considered to bear significantly on effectiveness and indeed which reflect the actual formal policies of some agencies.

Have the Poor Benefited? Evidence on Effectiveness and Impact

There is surprisingly little evidence available to indicate the type and extent of the impact of donor-funded interventions on the poor. First, most monitoring and evaluation reports tend to concentrate on physical outputs or on management processes rather than on the actual impact on beneficiaries. To assess impact would require the use of more sophisticated techniques and would cost more. Baseline surveys, which are very rarely conducted, would be needed, as well as the use of ‘control groups’ to compare the well-being of people in ‘with-project’ areas with non-benefiting areas, for instance. Also, only a small minority of interventions have been evaluated, thus sharply reducing the information base available to assess the benefits flowing to the poor. Finally, when monitoring and evaluation studies were carried out, they usually made little attempt to disaggregate impact, or even access to outputs, by socioeconomic group. Although they may be a useful source of information on general implementation effectiveness, they are unsatisfactory guides to the impact on poor groups in particular.

Poverty Reduction: Organization and Management of the European Agencies

There has been a clear shift among the European development agencies in the 1990s towards greater commitment to poverty reduction objectives and only a few donors have bucked the poverty trend, the most obvious examples being France and Spain. The ‘committed’ donors have also shown a growing consensus on their stated operational aims for PR. Yet, the experience set out in the earlier chapters, if representative, also reveals surprisingly few examples of ‘good practice’ approaches being realized by these donors in their own poverty assessments, in their country strategies and dialogue processes or in their direct interventions on the ground relating to poverty reduction. A clear analysis of what poverty means, who the poor are, and which interventions are likely to benefit the poor most, is often strangely lacking. Even where poverty has been well conceptualized at headquarters level, as is the case for Denmark, Germany and Sweden, donor country strategies remain disappointingly short on strategic thinking. Part of the explanation for this seems to lie in the organizational structure and management systems of the donor agencies themselves.1

Poverty Reduction Goals and Strategies of the European Development Cooperation Agencies

In this chapter we pose several major questions. What are the poverty reduction goals of the European development agencies in the countries with which they have relations? How have their strategies changed? Have there been changes in donor commitment to poverty goals, in their conceptualization of poverty, or in the degree of consensus they share on the operational aims to pursue greater poverty reduction? How feasible are these aims? Chapter 3 then examines in more detail the various roles that donor agencies can play in promoting poverty reduction. Subsequent chapters consider how effective donor-supported interventions have actually been, and what lessons can be learned.

Options for Reaching the Poor More Effectively: Some New Thinking

In the last few years, and especially with the 1996 International Poverty Reduction goals for 2015, some rethinking on approaches has been emerging. Several donors — more especially Danida, DFID, Sida, the European Union; the SPA working group on poverty1 as well as the OECD-DAC Secretariat in Paris — have espoused changed approaches to poverty reduction. Some new ideas are reviewed here: the concept of partnership, the consensus on a single country strategy, a shift towards using sectoral approaches to poverty reduction and mechanisms for linking debt relief to poverty reduction. At this early stage it is only possible to assess the options largely on a priori grounds although there is some relevant partial evidence.

Good and Bad Approaches: Case Study Evidence

In each of the country studies a common approach was followed based on an agreed methodology. The depth of analysis varied across the studies depending on the resources available, with most involving field studies of one or two weeks, many of them conducted by local researchers. The case studies were not designed to be yet another round of ‘quick and dirty’ evaluations of aid effectiveness, but to provide analyses of good practice (and of factors leading to failure) based on the perceptions of a wide range of stakeholders. These included both ‘insiders’ within the government and donor organizations and ‘outsiders’, namely, intended ‘beneficiaries’ and ‘non-beneficiaries’, ‘opinion formers’ and poor individuals and groups themselves. Information was gathered from project and programme documents, monitoring and evaluation reports (where available), interviews at a regional or national level, and through visits to project and programme sites.

Role and Modes of Intervention of the Development Cooperation Agencies for Poverty Reduction

Chapter 2 reviewed the poverty reduction goals and aims of the European development agencies, but what are their own roles in helping to achieve them? This chapter considers the nature of these roles and the modes of intervention that can be used, and poses some choices which donors need to make between the options available to them. It then looks at the limited published evidence on the fulfillment of these roles.